Watching over Reading

Watching over Reading

Seeing is believing . The best way to trigger an event is to watch it when it unfolds. Although I read so much about the tsunami followed by the earth quake in Japan, not until I saw those visuals in TV, I understood the magnitude of its devastation. Reading requires us to visualize the situation through our imagination; on the other hand a movie gives a colorful feast to our eyes without straining our brain. Moreover, reading is more time consuming and painstaking than watching a movie. Hence, when it comes to enjoyment, I always rate ‘watching movies’ over ‘reading books’.

Reading a novel is painstaking. We have to remember many characters and their names. Many times, we get confused with relations between two characters. Most of the books will be written in systematic style of English. It is sometimes very difficult for a non-native speaker to understand the meaning of tough and unfamiliar words used in the text. In contrast, while watching the movie, although important, remembering the names and characters is not paramount. Even if we forget the names, we can identify the characters based on their roles when we watch them again on the screen. So, while watching a movie is a pleasure, reading a book is painstaking and uneventful many times.

Quite often, a novel necessitates us to visualize a scene. In an effort to help us in visualizing the scene, author takes a couple of pages just to describe it. When it comes to a movie, all we have to do is sit in a cinema and have a visual feast. We neither have to think nor have to imagine anything while watching a movie. If not because of watching it, I can’t imagine how difficult and boring it would have been for me to read a big book on TITANIC.
While it won’t take more than a day for us to watch all sequels of the Harry Potter movie, we need at least a month to read all books of Harry potter. At the end of the day, those...